


5 Times Sokka Draws Zuko (+1 Time He Doesn't)

by mindbending



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: 5+1 Things, Art, Fluff, Getting Together, Light Angst, M/M, Pining, Post-Canon, he is putting those trillion brain cells to good use!, sokka invented artist's charcoal!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-02
Updated: 2020-08-02
Packaged: 2021-03-06 07:14:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,012
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25659550
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mindbending/pseuds/mindbending
Summary: For the sake of his swordsmanship, Sokka must practice art; Master Piandao was clear on the matter.For the sake of his art, Sokka must study his subjects intensely.That's the only reason he spends all his days gazing at Zuko. Honestly.
Relationships: Sokka/Zuko (Avatar)
Comments: 162
Kudos: 1683





	5 Times Sokka Draws Zuko (+1 Time He Doesn't)

_(One)_

“Zuko, stop moving, I’m trying to capture the moment!”

The first time, it’s not about Zuko. It's just that the winds are about to scatter their happy group to the edges of their world, and Uncle Iroh’s tea shop has this soft rosy glow that’ll disappear with the sunset, and Zuko’s out of his stiff golden epaulets and the blood-red royal robes that threaten to drown him and his hair’s spiking wildly like it’s supposed to-

(Okay, so maybe it’s a little bit about Zuko.)

Sokka’s going for a perfect rendering of this moment, but it doesn’t come out _right._ Katara’s hair loopies _do_ look like Momo’s ears, and maybe it’s hard to tell Appa apart from the mountain range, and Iroh looks less like a human than that sand sculpture Sokka did on Ember Island. Worst of all, Zuko looks rough and sullen, and while that’d be a perfect portrayal one year back, Sokka now sees him in a wholly different light.

_(Two)_

Zuko scowls. “Get out.”

“Or you’ll fight me?” Sokka prompts hopefully.

“Or I’ll write to Katara saying you’re trying to spar, _again-"_

“Aww, you _care.”_

“I care about Katara not _dethroning me because I can’t get you to rest._ One treasonous little sister’s enough!”

Sokka yields and exits the training yard in a gracious and dignified manner, shouting at the top of his lungs: “You caaaaare!”

He sneaks one glance back, expecting a melodramatic eyeroll to top all other teenagers ever, but Zuko’s just shaking his head, perilously close to a smile.

/

Sokka gets back into ordinary clothes and plops down at the edge of the training yard to mope, slumping over theatrically. He knows it’s hard to impress Zuko, King of Adolescent Anguish, when it comes to sulking, but he has to try. His leg’s stayed messed-up since the comet, and Katara throws around a lot of big words like “overexertion” and “reinjury” and “permanent damage to a key ligament.” And since Sokka’s staying behind in the Fire Nation for now, tasked with rebuilding diplomatic channels between this country and the Water Tribe, Katara threatened to kill Zuko if Sokka did any further damage to himself.

(“Why me?” Zuko had spluttered.

“Because you’re the Fire Lord! You’re responsible for shenanigans in your own palace!”

Sokka had nearly joked that he wouldn’t mind her knocking off Zuko, but the jibe stuck in his throat, like a surprise sea prune pit.)

So now Zuko’s using all his royal wiles to keep Sokka away from hiking and exercise and _fun,_ and it’s Sokka’s spirits-given right to mope about it. He watches all the guards and nobles enjoying themselves with a wide variety of awesome stabby objects, _all without him._

He means to throw his entire soul into moping, but his focus drifts slowly to Zuko. Currently, he’s sparring with the head of his guard. His top-knot’s askew, but his stance is unbreakably solid, and no one can say the Fire Nation doesn’t dance, not when Zuko’s footwork is steady and smooth as any choreography out there. Zuko’s narrowed his eyes, not in a temper tantrum but in lethal concentration, and the muscles of his arms and bare chest ripple, mesmerizing under the golden sun. 

Zuko’s wielding bamboo practice swords. There’s no threat of imminent doom. Still, Sokka’s heart races like _he’s_ the one fighting.

Zuko stumbles, and gets up again, and pulls a victory from out of nowhere, blade flashing up to his foe’s throat. She surrenders with a laugh and a bow, and Zuko bows respectfully back before crossing the yard to Sokka.

“Nice work,” Sokka says, “Sifu Hotman.”

Zuko just snorts, flopping down next to him. “You can get better at swordfighting without a literal sword, you know.” Sokka nearly barges in with a joke about certain metaphorical swords, but Zuko saves him from himself by adding, “Remember Master Piandao? He said you need a ton of different hobbies to master the sword. Calligraphy. Reading. Art…”

“Ugh.”

“It’s not all bad!”

“You’ve seen my art, it’s _all bad.”_

Now Zuko rolls his eyes. “Art takes practice. It’s a rule: you have to ruin at least a hundred sheets of expensive papers before anything comes out right.”

Sokka eyes him. “Is that unsolicited wisdom coming from _experience?”_

“...Maybe.”

Sokka’s eyebrows shoot up. “Oh, spirits. What did you draw? _Love Amongst the Dragons_ fanart?”

“Of course not!”

“Really.”

“Mostly not.”

Sokka waits for him to continue, nudging him gently with an elbow.

“You know how Master Piandao’s really into ‘stamping your identity on the page’?” Zuko pauses, waiting for Sokka to nod. “Well, I figured I could get better at calligraphy _and_ painting if I just did self-portraits.”

“Oooh, got any expert tips?”

“I’m not an expert! But I guess my best advice is...” His voice slips recognizably into Master Piandao’s cadence. “You can learn the precision of the sword, even with a stroke of the brush. The subtleties of art will hone your focus on the battlefield. And-” he sounds like himself again- “you can explain an awful lot of mistakes away if you call them symbolism.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Sokka chuckles. “Hey, can I see what you draw?”

The ease in Zuko’s posture falls away, and his smile turns suddenly brittle. “I don’t do art anymore. Sorry.”

“Oh.” Sokka shrugs. “That’s okay. Uh. Any reason why?”

Zuko slumps forward without meaning to and bows his head down, like he’s trying to disappear into the bench. 

“...after I got exiled, self-portraits kinda lost their appeal.”

/

Focus is overrated, and no one needs “precision” anyway.

With a groan Sokka thrusts away the fifth sheet of pretty paper that he’s ruined in as many hours. He’s spent five hours staring at a spirits-damned vase with flowers in it, because that’s what you do, right? You paint vases and bowls of fruit until the stormclouds part and the spirits bless you with artistic enlightenment?

For good measure he kicks the leg of the table. Unfortunately for him, the vibration rumbles up, shaking the nice mint limeade he got from the kitchens and tipping it right over onto his work-

When he convinces his eyelids to open again, he finds it’s an _improvement._ If he squints, he can now pass the green-tinted roses off as cabbages. As that one guy’s cabbages, after another collision with the Avatar squashed them all to puree. Hey, he could pass this off as a 100% accurate rendering of a key moment in history as recalled by a first-hand observer. He could make _money_ off of this!

Sokka shuts down the delusions of grandeur before they spiral too far and starts a new painting. He goes for a picturesque sunset, but the sun deflates and ends up as a dumpling on a platter. With a new sheet of paper, he goes for a tsungi horn, but the proportions are all off and it ends up as the collar of someone’s hanbok. Next he goes for a simple rendering of a penguin, but he spills too much ink, and the wet paper outright tears.

He pokes at it, sadly rubbing at the rip and watching the paper crumple up, until Zuko’s advice strikes him like a sunbeam through the clouds. The rolled-up paper looks sort of feathery. Sort of _fluffy._ Like _Appa._

Sokka resolves to draw Appa and then wet the paper on _purpose,_ to crumple up lots of paper and get that fleecy 3-D effect. But when he goes for the initial outline of Appa’s stripes, they end up too close together and all askew, and he scowls at the black waves, weird and shapeless and resembling _nothing-_

Except perhaps a phoenix tail, a plume of black hair fluttering in the wind.

Sokka’s breath catches. Chasing that first spark of inspiration, he fills in the entire image around it, a boy with his head shaven but for the one lone ponytail.

So far, Sokka’s paintings have never ever gone the way he _expects._ Still, he admits begrudgingly, they seem to turn out how they’re supposed to.

_(Three)_

Sokka flops from his chair onto the floor, abandoning his parchment and brush. He is an artistic failure. He should be banned from drawing anything _ever again._

He just tried to paint an airship, but then he dripped paint _everywhere._ And though he then tried to turn the parchment upside down and pass the balloon off as the body of a snow leopard caribou, with the basket as the antlers, he has to admit it looks like only one thing: an unredeemable disaster.

The next morning he relays his woes to Zuko, who hears him out with surprising sympathy.

“I’m kind of the resident expert on unredeemable disasters,” he replies when Sokka finishes. “So I have an idea for you.”

“Break my hands too so I can’t hold a brush?”

“That wouldn’t stop you, you’d end up inventing a little metal arm to hold the brush for you,” he snorts, and Sokka has to admit he’s right. “Anyway, the answer isn’t _giving up.”_

It’s an eminently reasonable sentiment. Sokka groans on principle.

“Try drawing one thing. Just one thing, until you really _know_ it inside out. Something interesting, with enough angles that you don’t get bored. Like...” He glances out the window, face softening as he looks out at the homeland he now rules. “Like the Caldera skyline. I could paint it a hundred times without getting bored.”

“Then why don’t you?”

Zuko glares at him.

“The answer isn’t giving up,” Sokka teases, unreasonably smug when he wins a chuckle.

(Too soon, Zuko’s chuckle dims to a sigh.)

/

So Sokka has to find something endlessly interesting. Something that can fascinate him through a hundred failed sketches. Something with a million new angles waiting to be discovered.

At first he contemplates trying to paint the sky with its ever-changing cloud formations, but that’d mean spending hours looking right into the blazing Caldera sun. He tries installing himself in the palace kitchens and drawing the pantry, which the cooks restock constantly with new exotic cuts of meat. Against all odds, meat too fails to keep his interest past the first night.

/

Sokka looks around the conference room during his next meeting, as yet another Fire Nation minister drones on uselessly. Sokka’s got his handy journal in front of him, ready to take notes, but he hasn’t opened it yet because the minister hasn’t said _anything worth remembering yet._

In contrast Zuko watches the minister intently, straight-backed and unrecognizably regal, clearly in charge of the room though he hasn’t spoken in an hour. He looks completely interested, which means he’s far better at lying than Sokka gave him credit for.

So Sokka tries not to yawn and looks around the conference room. It’s not the official Throne Room- Sokka has no idea what that place even looks like, Zuko’s never once used it- but it’s still decorated sumptuously with gold and elaborate torches. Sokka tries to find something worth fixating on for a hundred drawings and sees nothing, nothing, until-

His gaze snags on Zuko, whose regal composure slips for just one second, just long enough to slip Sokka a smile. Sokka returns it, then dips a brush into his inkpot and flips to a clean page.

He’s going for accuracy. It’s the only reason his eyes flit back up again and stay, staring.

  
  


_(Four)_

Sokka drops his head onto his desk (lightly, for Katara’s sake, he’s been banned from concussions), and he sighs. Beside him stands a stack of sketches, all abandoned. They’re all sketches of Zuko, and they’re _wrong,_ though Sokka can’t even articulate _why._ But there’s just so much of Zuko rattling around his brain nowadays, dazzling and golden and mercurial as a flame, and Sokka can't translate even a sliver of that to paper. He can’t do Zuko justice.

He tries. Spirits know he tries, throwing himself into the task with all the focus and precision and heart that he’s got. He watches Zuko all the time now, in council meetings and sparring matches. He steals glances at Zuko as they’re bent over their respective mountains of paperwork late at night. He lingers with Zuko by the turtleduck pond, and memorizes the rare soft smiles he grants the birds.

(He’s never kept track of Zuko’s expressions before, so it’s a surprise when Zuko turns the same soft smile on _him.)_

For the sake of his art, Sokka watches, and learns Zuko’s posture and his way of walking, the million masks he wears as Fire Lord and the rare strains of honest adolescence that peek through. 

(It's 110% about the art.)

Sokka rifles through the pictures, unable to bring himself to throw them out. Objectively, his sense of proportion’s improved rapidly. His lines are more confident, he’s mostly figured out how shading works, and on a few tries he’s even captured something like _personality._ A sense of motion, of potential. Of fire.

/

Ink isn’t up to the challenge. More honestly, Sokka’s skills aren’t up to the challenge, but he blames the ink for convenience and shifts his approach. Zuko is unlike anyone Sokka knows. Sokka needs to find whole new styles of art for him.

At first he turns to colored paint. Zuko and Aang only described their field trip to the Sun Civilization in vague terms, but Sokka’s trawled through enough of the palace library to guess _exactly_ what they found there.

He tries to paint two dragons, red and blue entwining together around the central space where he’ll fill in Zuko later. Unfortunately the paint instantly overflows its outlined bounds, so Sokka improvises. He sticks a finger in and runs it back and forth, discovering purple where the colors touch. Then he adds on dollops of every other paint he’s got, mixing and swirling and creating the perfect symbolic representation of the dragons’ rainbow fire…

Turns out if you mix a lot of vivid, gorgeous colors, you get mud-brown.

Next up, he considers getting his hands on Zuko’s dao. He saw one of the palace artists painting with a special palette knife, so maybe he could achieve an innovative special effect by upgrading to an actual sword. Bigger is better, right?

He sneaks a random sword from the armory just to test the theory and ends up stabbing right through the paper. That’s maybe _not_ the best symbolism when drawing a young, precariously positioned Fire Lord.

So Sokka lies in bed thinking of Zuko. Of the gold of his eyes. Of the flames that play about his fingers. Of the way he keeps falling and rising from the ashes. Move over, Ozai: Zuko’s the _real_ Phoenix King.

...Sokka has the best idea.

/

He knocks at Zuko’s door one night. “Here.”

Zuko looks down at the metal box newly dropped on his desk. “What is this?”

“A box.”

Zuko gives him a look.

“Can you set it on fire please?”

Zuko narrows his eyes. “Why?”

“Pretty please?”

“Is this-” he lifts the box, weighing it without touching the lid- “evidence of a crime that you’re trying to destroy?”

“If I committed a crime,” Sokka splutters, “why would I hand the evidence to the Fire Lord?”

“So when I help you destroy it I’m complicit,” he explains. “That way I have to step in if you get caught!”

“...I’ll keep that in mind next time I need to clean up a crime scene.”

Zuko rolls his eyes. “How hot?”

“Uh.” Sokka frowns. “Not blue?”

“How long?”

“...a while?”

“Very specific.” Zuko shakes his head, and for one second Sokka thinks he’ll turn him away. Instead he asks a servant to bring a brazier, and he places the box inside and waves a hand, summoning a deep red flame.

/

Sokka returns three hours later and finds that Zuko’s maintained the fire steadily. He nearly makes a joke, an awful pun about how Zuko’s carrying a torch for him, but he stops himself at the last possible second and just dons two heat-resistant gloves. Without even being asked, Zuko extinguishes the flame, and Sokka checks the contents.

Perfect.

“You’re the best,” Sokka says, closing the box back up.

“Shut up.”

But a deep red blush is creeping up from Zuko’s collar, and Sokka commits that to memory for a future painting. For tonight though, he has to keep his focus. He has to render Zuko in black and white. 

Tonight, he’ll discover whether it’s possible to make art with freshly made charcoal.

_(Five)_

“Sokka,” Zuko says as another conference winds down, “did the Minister of Trade propose a 9% tariff or an 11% tariff on Earth Kingdom lychee nuts?”

“Uh…”

“Isn’t it in your journal?”

Sokka looks down at his journal. It’s open, pages filled with freshly dried ink, but there’s not a note to be found. He looks back up just in time to see Zuko break down chuckling.

“Am I that obvious?”

“No,” Zuko snorts, “I just know how to spot a doodler.”

He rises and walks over, clearly curious. But before he can catch a glimpse, Sokka slams the journal shut.

Zuko scowls.

“They’re not interesting,” Sokka says.

“They’re yours,” Zuko retorts, “so I’m interested.”

“They’re just sketches!”

“Oh, so you wanna show me something better.”

“Yeah!” Sokka exclaims whole-heartedly before processing the question. “Wait. No!”

“Too late,” Zuko says with a growing, devious smile. “I’ll see you after dinner. Pick your best.”

/

True to his word, Zuko knocks on the door to Sokka’s quarters that night. Sokka opens it too quickly, waiting just inside.

“Hi.”

“Hi,” Zuko replies, and he’s blushing again, and Sokka really needs to invent a paint that captures that color, a hue like the full bloom of sunset.

“As you commanded-” Sokka sweeps into a deep bow- “Mr. Majestic Fire Lord, I have assembled a humble array of my offerings-”

“Sokka,” Zuko interrupts stiffly. “I apologize. If your art’s too personal, if you don’t want me to see it, then forget I ever said anything.”

Sokka straightens up, dumbstruck.

Yes, his art is too personal. There’s silent meaning in the soft curves. There’s accidental symbolism in every airy highlight, in every delicately preserved expression. There are feelings blazing all through his art, gloriously clear, though he’s never articulated any of them to himself.

His art is wretchedly, painfully personal, yet he wants nothing more than for Zuko to see it.

“You don’t have to look if you don’t want to,” Sokka offers. 

“I do want to,” Zuko splutters in a rush, “I just don’t want to if you don’t want to-”

Sokka splutters right over him: “It’s fine, it’s just that I’m new and I keep doing things I’m not supposed to and it...never comes out the way I expect.”

Zuko’s face softens. “Show me?”

Sokka leads him inside to the desk where he’s laid out his two of his favorite works.

“...wow,” he says, low and flat, and Sokka cringes.

“Yeah,” he says apologetically. “I know. They’re not the most accurate.”

“I’ll say,” Zuko intones, examining the first image. 

It’s mostly a white sheet of paper, but in the center a man stands in profile, cupping his hands. Sokka rendered the scene in the brightest paints he could manage, building layer upon layer of rich color, careful to let each hue shine without dimming to brown. The man has long hair spilling loose, the way Zuko might in a few years, and one might mistake him for Ozai if not for the gentle expression Sokka painstakingly crafted. If not for the burst of color cradled in his hands. At first glance, it might seem like a bouquet of flowers.

But Zuko brushes his fingers over the man’s hands, over the rough curls of paint that have dried in waves.

“You painted me bending _dragon fire.”_

“Yeah,” says Sokka.

Zuko glances at him. “You know humans can’t make that, right?”

Sokka shrugs. “But I know you’re trying for it, which means you’ll get there, a couple years down the line.”

He laughs, startled. “You have too much faith in me.”

“No-”

 _“And_ you’ve painted me smiling. Clear abuse of artistic license, right there.”

“That’s how you look at the turtleducks,” Sokka protests.

Zuko glares at him. But a moment later the look melts into fondness as he fights off a smile identical to the one in the painting.

Too quickly, Zuko yanks his focus back to the second work- a drawing, mostly in black and white. Sokka drew the lines with a few solid sticks of his charcoal, sharpened to a point, but he ground the rest to powder and scattered it across the paper, covering it in shimmering silver, moving the charcoal dust with his brush to form pools of shadow. 

“This...doesn’t look anything like me,” Zuko says, weirdly choked.

Sokka smiles through the hurt. “Yeah, I know, I kinda invented a new medium for this one and I’m still getting the hang _-”_

“That’s not the issue.” He scoffs. “These are both gorgeous.”

“And?” says Sokka, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

“And I’m not.”

After one moment of miserable silence, Sokka narrows his eyes. “Why do you think these are inaccurate?”

Zuko looks back at him, eyes wide like a cat deer caught by surprise. “Why do _you_ think these are inaccurate?”

“Because the shading’s off? And the poses are a mess, and I got too heavy-handed with the entire ash theme, and the draping on your clothes is _impossible?”_

“I…” Zuko gapes back at him. “Look. I get that the royal painters have to pretty me up, but no one’s going to throw you in jail, if you draw me the way I actually look.”

“I am drawing you the way you actually look!” Sokka protests. “This-” he gestures to both works- “is how I see you!”

Zuko scowls and jabs a finger at the charcoal picture. “But you made the scar look nice!”

Sokka did make it look nice. He spent several sleepless nights listing possible materials, something to pair with the charcoal, something striking and symbolically appropriate. He kept circling back to the phoenix, a creature of bronze and gold rising from ash.

It’s why the scar is the one pop of color, rendered in gleaming copper and gold leaf.

“You bet I made the scar look nice,” Sokka exclaims. “It’s symbolism! It has to be special, because _you’re_ special!”

“Only because I’m a Fire Lord,” Zuko says, growing increasingly distressed. “And you don’t care about that, not like everyone else, so why would you _bother_ trying to make me seem special-”

Faced with a monologue less sensical than Momo's chittering, Sokka feels his brain shut down. He grabs Zuko by his ridiculous epaulets, leans forward, and kisses him.

/

This is not how he expected the evening to go, but things turn out how they’re supposed to.

/

When they break apart, the only response Zuko can manage is, “Uh.”

“Do you get it now?” 

“I’m really slow,” Zuko says, hesitantly. “Maybe I need some more clarification.”

Sokka takes a moment to decode that, a sly smile slipping across his face. “I can provide that.”

“And if the draping on my clothes is so difficult for you...” He trails off.

Once Sokka picks up on _this_ implication, his jaw drops.

He’s going to draw _all night._

_(Plus One)_

Years later, Sokka wakes at sunrise. Not by choice, but he reaches out in his sleep and feels an empty space, and that no longer feels right.

When he lifts his head, he finds Zuko at his bedroom desk, bent over a paper and an inkwell. At first Sokka wonders if he’s filling out paperwork, but his brush moves in long arcs, too large for any character.

“Are you drawing the skyline?”

Caldera’s skyline glimmers gorgeous outside their window, dappled by sunlight.

“No.”

“Are you drawing _me?”_

“...I was before you got up and started _moving,"_ he replies grumpily.

But their eyes meet, and they share a smile. Then- and only because he’s an adoring sap who can deny his husband nothing- Sokka promptly falls back asleep.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading. Kudos and comments are much appreciated <3


End file.
